A replaceable unit monitor (RUM), such as a customer replaceable unit monitor (CRUM) or an engineer replaceable unit monitor (ERUM), is used to monitor the status of a replaceable unit (RU). For example, a CRUM reader accesses a CRUM and obtains the information regarding the status of a customer replaceable unit (CRU).
A Radio Frequency (RF) RUM reader system may include a host processor (or host) and a Coupler board (or coupler) that is a communications interface between the host processor and the RF RUM such as a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag. In order to access an RFID tag, the host processor is directly involved in a number of steps to Initiate and Select the tag before it is possible to communicate with it. This consumes considerable amount of the host computer's processing time. This is particularly true when the tag dynamically moves in and out of the system's RFID Coupler board's radio frequency field. In this case the host's real processing time is wasted when it is attempting to initiate a tag that is not in the RF field.